As early as the mid-eighteenth century, travelers also found a
characteristic style of vernacular architecture in the Appalachian
highlands. "These people live in open log cabins with hardly a
blanket to cover them." Charles Woodmason observed in 1767.43

Log cabins had not been much used by English colonists in
Massachusetts, Virginia or the Delaware Valley during the
seventeenth century and were not invented on the American frontier.
The leading authority on this subject, H. B. Shurtleff, concludes
after long study that the log cabin was first introduced by
Scandinavians, and popularized mainly by Scots-Irish settlers in
the eighteenth century. "The log cabin did not commend itself to
the English colonists," Shurtleff wrote. "The Scotch Irish who
began coming over in large numbers after 1718 seem to have been the
first . . . to adopt it."44

The historiography of the log cabin has centered mostly on the
history of the log, but at least equally important is the history
of the cabin. The trail of that topic leads from the American
backcountry to the British borderlands. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, cabin architecture was commonplace
throughout the Scottish lowlands and northern Ireland, and also in
the English counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and
Northumberland, but not often in the south of England. Travelers
in the border country expressed surprise at the state of housing
they found there. One soldier from the south of England, marching
north near Duns a few miles beyond the river Tweed, noted that the
"husbandmen's houses ... resemble our swine coates, few or none of
them have more storeys than one, and that very low and covered
usually with clods of earth, the people and their habits are
suitable to the dwellings."45

Small and impermanent houses were common throughout North Britain,
in part because the system of land tenure gave no motive for
improvement. An historian of Scotland wrote in 1521:

In Scotland, the houses of the country people are small, as it
were, cottages, and the reason is this: they have no permanent
holdings, but hired only, or in lease for four or five years, at
the pleasure of the lord of the soil; therefore do they not dare to
build good houses, though stone abound, neither do they plant trees
or hedges for their orchards, nor do they dung their land; and this
is no small loss and damage to the whole realm.46

On the borders, this factor was compounded by chronic insecurity.
There, cottages became cabins of even more primitive construction.
The word "cabin" itself was a border noun that meant any sort of
rude enclosure, commonly built of the cheapest materials that came
to hand: turf and mud in Ireland, stone and dirt in Scotland, logs
and clay in America....

Methods of construction also tended to be much the same on both
sides of the water. The spaces between the logs or other materials
were "daubed" with clay. In the English border county of
Cumberland, this was done in a communal event called a "claydaubin"
where neighbors and friends of a newly married couple came together
and built them a cabin with weathertight walls. The work was
directed by men called daubers. The same technique of wattle and
clay daubing (sometimes called wattle and funk) was widely used in
the American backcountry. In 1753, for example, James Patton had
two "round log houses" on his Shenandoah farm, with "clapboard
roofs, two end log chimnies, all chunked and daubed both inside and
out."

....Cabin architecture was striking for its roughness and impermanence. It was a simple style of building, suitable
to a
migratory people with little wealth, few possessions and small
confidence in the future. It was also an inconspicuous structure,
highly adapted to a violent world where a handsome building was an
invitation to disaster. In that respect, cabin architecture was an
expression of the insecurity of life in the northern borders.47

The cabin was also the product of a world of scarcity. It was a
style of vernacular architecture created by deep and grinding
poverty through much of north Britain during the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century. In that barren country, cabins made
of earth and stone were an adaptation to an environment in which
other building materials were rare.

Cabin architecture was also a style of building well suited to a
people who had a strong sense of family and a weak sense of
individual privacy. Travelers from the south of England expressed
horror at the lack of respect for privacy. Much the same
observations were also made in the American backcountry. "They
sleep altogether in common in one room, and shift and dress openly
without ceremony," Woodmason wrote, "... nakedness is counted as
nothing." Sometimes there was not even a bed. William Byrd
described one backcountry family that "pigged lovingly together" on
the floor."48

In the eighteenth century, these cabins began to rise throughout
the American backcountry wherever migrants from North Britain
settled. The strong resemblance of these houses to the vernacular
architecture of the borders was noted by travelers who knew both
places. One English traveler noted of a Scots-Irish settlement in
the backcountry of Pennsylvania that the people lived in "paltry
log houses, and as dirty as in the north of Ireland, or even
Scotland."49

Cabin architecture was not static in its new environment.
Folklorists have studied in fascinating detail the hewing of cabin
logs, the notching of corners, the development of floor plans and
the refinement of fenestration. This was mostly a form of cultural
involution, in which things changed by becoming more elaborately
the same.50

The architecture of the cabin itself was merely one part of an ,
entire regional vernacular which also included other structures.
Barns and stables were crude, impermanent shelters, often made of
saplings and boughs a method widely used in the border country.51
Cattle were kept in simple enclosures called cowpens, descended
from border "barmkins" which had been built for centuries in North
Britain. Historians Bouch end Jones note that "the basis of
medieval settlement appears to have been the 'barmkin,' a sort of
corral or stockade, where behind a timber fence, cattle and
dependents could shelter, defended by menfolk." Cowpens became very
common throughout the southern highlands in the eighteenth century.
One such area in the Carolina upcountry became the site of the
battle of Cowpens during the American War for Independence.52

In North Britain the architecture of cabin and cowpen began to be
abandoned during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as
violence diminished and prosperity increased. The vernacular
architecture that one finds throughout the region today was a later
development. "In the seventeenth century," one local historian
writes, "the statesmen had begun to build better houses, in
imitation of Jacobean manor halls, and evolved a type of their
own the low, rough-cast building with porch and pent- house, a
dead-nailed door and massive threshwood, mullioned windows, and
behind the rannel-balk a great open fire-spit where peat burned on
the cobble-paved hearth."53

But the architecture of cabin and cowpens persisted for many
generations in the American backcountry. As late as 1939 there were
270,000 occupied log cabins in the United States. Many were in the
southern highlands. In the county of Halifax, Virginia, 42 percent
of all houses were log cabins as recently as World War II.54

Even today an architecture of impermanence survives in new forms
such as prefabricated houses and mobile homes, which are popular
throughout the southern highlands. The mobile home is a cabin on
wheels small, cheap, simple and temporary. The materials have
changed from turf and logs to plastic and aluminum, but in its
conception the mobile home preserves an architectural attitude that
was carried to the backcountry nearly three centuries ago.